A controversial new book by Martin Amis on the political executions and terror of Stalin's Soviet Union has been attacked by Russian historians and human rights activists who have branded it 'haughty' and 'unacceptable'.

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, which will be published in Britain next month, chronicles the Terror inflicted by the Cheka, Stalin's secret police, and the famines of Soviet collectivisation, during which an estimated 20 million perished or were murdered. In the book Amis attempts a literary interpretation of the genocide, asking why 'laughter refuses to absent itself' from the tragedy, and concluding that the period best fits into the literary genre of a 'black farce'.

Russian experts were enraged by the comments. A human rights campaigner in the Russian parliament, Sergei Kovalyov, who spent seven years in jail under Brezhnev for anti-Soviet agitation, said: 'How can you talk about laughter in connection with the millions of victims, streams of blood and endless lying? As far as I understand the author is trying to make a cultural analysis, and it seems to me that such an approach to Stalinism is hardly acceptable. It is not appropriate to compare literary styles and tragedies in real life.'

Nikita Petrov, a historian at Memorial, an organisation dedicated to the remembrance of Stalin's victims, said: 'I have some doubts about the role of laughter in understanding Soviet history because in that there is an element of haughtiness of the author, who is a citizen of a country that has not experienced [the things Russia did].'

Amis previously addressed the topic of genocide in his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow, which told the story of the Holocaust backwards, reversing the chronology so, for example, the Nazi death camps seemed to make people come to life. Elements of the Jewish community reacted angrily to the novel, accusing Amis of insensitivity. An angry Russian reaction to Koba The Dread will prompt accusations that he has repeated his mistake and been insensitive about Europe's two biggest genocides.

In Koba the Dread, Amis asks why history is not as - if not more - sombre about Stalin's Terror, which claimed many more lives than the Holocaust. He concludes: 'There's something in Bolshevism that is painfully, unshirkably comic.' Russians have reacted hostilely because of Amis's detached style, in which he searches for the right 'literary genre' for the genocidal regime - a black farce. Petrov said: 'Soviet history can be represented as a funny anecdote, but I don't think that it is productive because there were serious things in Soviet history.'

Much of the book is an examination of Stalin's victims, using the materials of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer who boldly first wrote about the horrors of the gulag, and Robert Conquest, the British historian who shed greater light on the Terror in the West. Amis writes: 'Russia 1917-53: what is its genre? It is not tragedy, like Lear, not an anti-comedy, like Troilus and Cressida, nor yet a problem comedy, like Measure for Measure. It is a black farce, like Titus Andronicus. And the black farce is very Russian, from Dead Souls to Laughter in the Dark.'

Amis also finds the 'gap between the words and deeds' of the Bolshevik regime - what they said was happening and what was happening in reality - to be comical. Kovalyov responded: 'It may be that the accusations [the secret police made against Russians in that time] were ridiculous. But how could we laugh if people were sentenced to death or many years in prison?'

Amis wrote the book partly for personal reasons. He muses on the recent death of his sister Sally, comparing his emotions at her loss, with the emotions surrounding the losses of Stalin's Terror. Amis's insertion of many personal references in a book that deals with the world's worst genocide led a reviewer in the New York Times to accuse him of 'the narcissistic musings of a spoiled, upper-middle-class litterateur who has never known the kind of real suffering Stalin's victims did'.

Amis also attacks the admiration in which Bolshevism was held by both his father, the author Kingsley, and close friend, the writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens. The book closes with a letter, addressed to his late father, in which Amis writes: 'You believed, and believed in, Soviet Communism for 15 years. There were, as Bob [Robert Conquest] says, no rational justifications for doing so.'

The Russian critics agreed with Amis's lengthy condemnation and exposition of Stalin's Terror, but objected to his analysis and comments. Petrov disagreed with Amis's belief that the Terror happened mostly as Stalin 'liked it'. Petrov said: 'We cannot explain the Terror of 1937 to 1938 only through the pathological character of Stalin. The ideas of Bolshevism and [the] typical Communist Utopian also caused this Great Terror.' Petrov and Kovalyov were shown passages from the book, which has yet to be published in Russia. A spokeswoman for Amis said the author was unavailable to comment.

Kovalyov added: 'Farce is not the best choice of word. When I think about it, it is more suitable to remind ourselves of the phrase: In history, tragedy repeats itself as farce. In this case today's Russia is a farce, and Stalin's Russia is a tragedy. In [the] Soviet Union we had jokes, and people were [sent] to prison for them.'

Kovalyov recounts one such joke in which several prisoners meet and begin discussing their cases. One says: 'I am here for criticising Radik [one of Stalin's advisers].' The second says: 'I am here for praising Radik.' They ask the third prisoner what he is there for, and he replies: 'I am Radik.'